


from better days

by irritable



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: :), Character Study, Gen, Lesbian Character of Color, ms mercy angela ziegler herself appears in 1 sentence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:20:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24717463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irritable/pseuds/irritable
Summary: Fareeha slows to a stop and puts her shopping bags down on the sidewalk. She tilts her head back and squints, making out the hard outlines of her city against the dark blue of the sky. The buildings are low here. She's noticed this a lot.She wonders, not for the first time, if Ana is watching her.
Relationships: Ana Amari & Fareeha "Pharah" Amari
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	from better days

**Author's Note:**

> no i wont proofread my fics before posting :) but yes i will come back repeatedly over the next month and edit it when i feel like it<3
> 
> title from "moving on" by sarah and the sundays

Two bags in each hand, Fareeha steps out of the grocery store, into the cold of a dusking day, and sets off home.

Her apartment is far enough away that anyone else would have taken the bus home, but Fareeha likes the walk. It's one of the few moments during her busy week that she gets to simply be. As such, grocery shopping is hardly a chore for her. The weight of her shopping bags isn't too bad to begin with, and besides, she didn't work out as often as she did for nothing.

Some cars rumble by. The bus stops are occupied by a handful of commuters, mostly keeping to themselves. As night falls, the streets will only become emptier. Soon, the street lights will turn on. Just as Fareeha likes it.

Being all on her own isn't something rare for her. Frequently, she finds herself on patrols alone. (Though, of course, her colleagues are never far away and always available on comms.) But there's something different about being alone on her own time, outside, in the middle of her city, and doing something mundane but essential. She feels, at once, empowered and impossibly insignificant. For now, she has a facade of anonymity.

Here, as just another solitary figure on the sidewalk, she finds there is a certain clarity to her thoughts that she usually lacks.

Dangerous as walking alone in the night might be, Fareeha has come to appreciate being invisible in this way. Anyway, she's far from stupid; there's a switchblade in her boot and she has a small firearm tucked into her jacket. Both of these weapons, she is adept at wielding. If all else fails, well, hand-to-hand combat is no problem for her. She’s quite a force to be reckoned with in the ring and she doubts muggers would have nearly the same training as her regular sparring partners.

So, she adjusts her grip on the bags and walks on under the lights, awkwardly blinking to life. 

People stare sometimes. Usually, they notice the Helix logo on her jacket first. She figures some must be curious about Anubis, or wary—as they should be, or more likely, resentful of what it represented.

Yes, then they notice the tattoo below her eye, stark black on her brown skin, and the familiarity of it tugs at a memory, and they remember more clearly: Overwatch and its late Captain Ana Amari.

They probably don’t know Fareeha is actually an Amari, the daughter of the famed captain no less. Her mother, however, had a distinctive look and was as public a figure could be back when Overwatch was in its prime. She had been credited a few times with the global popularization of the eye tattoo. 

Captain Amari’s memory lives on as stubbornly as her mother does. 

(Fareeha could say a number of things about that, especially on the appropriation of her culture. Mostly, however, she keeps it to herself. Would rather pretend those people didn't exist than start an argument on why she isn't being hypocritical when she tells them their tattoos are disrespectful.)

Fareeha isn’t ashamed, to be clear. She enjoys her work and has never regretted getting the tattoo. They are, to her, points of pride. Reminders of who she is, how far she's come, and why she must continue on and go farther, even. To protect.

Still, she prefers walking home at night, without all the loaded stares. A sense of normalcy settles in, carrying with it a calm.

As of late, her mother has crossed her mind more and more often, sporadically, whenever anything reminded Fareeha of her—which could be anything from the smell of her favourite tea to that of a smoking gun.

Walking down the street, holding her groceries, she thinks back to her memories of her mother.

As an adult, had Ana ever _just_ been a nobody, coming home from doing the shopping? Would she have chosen to take a stroll instead of the bus for the sake of enjoying the calm? What would she have worn? Certainly not jeans; Fareeha couldn’t remember a single time her mother had worn denim.

Ordinarily, people think she is too similar to her mother. In this aspect, she is the painful opposite. Fareeha likes her skinny jeans and her denim jackets, and the acid-washed coin pouch made of recycled “jorts” she'd gotten as a gag gift. She gladly suffers Angela's teasing for it, will openly admit that she is, indeed, “painfully Canadian." 

But, she supposes, if she were to mention their differences, she should start with the most obvious. Where Fareeha envisioned a decorated military career for herself, her mother saw her daughter leading a regular civilian life, 10 to 5 desk job, nice house, maybe a husband and kids. 

The future husband, Ana gave up easily enough. The issue of Fareeha's career was another matter entirely, placed a gap between them that neither of them knew how to cross. Really, at the time, neither wanted to be the one building the bridge over.

Even now, Fareeha continues to think that, despite the vehement arguments her mother had thrown at her, she can still have some semblance of civilian life. 

When she was younger, she would have believed this a given. Soldier’s were still people, after all. Someone had to go to the supermarket to buy groceries, someone had to cook, wash the dishes. Her mother, no doubt, would have frowned and snapped at her assumption.

It isn’t so simple.

Fareeha knows better now, grants this small victory to her mother, knows not to argue about semantics. It isn't the same for her, civilian life. It isn't something she can have at the same time as her career. And she knows she won't have it entirely once she's retired, as a military career isn't so easily shrugged off—that is, if she survives to retirement, anyway. 

Plenty of people are traumatized; the world is in disarray and has been for longer than Fareeha has been alive. People stay awake to avoid their nightmares and sleep to avoid their realities, just as she has. People have lost friends and family, just as she has. People have witnessed death happening around them, inside their very arms, just as she has. 

But her trauma includes the people that had died under her command, and by her hand, directly or indirectly. It is up to her alone to wrestle with the losses on her watch.

Her relationship with loss is a different sort of intimate. She could walk out the door not knowing if she would come back the same, come back whole, or even come back at all. She would do it. She does.

Most people don't ask for their trauma. It is something to be avoided, and here she is, marching towards it, accepting the consequences.

She had chosen this by pursuing a military career, had chosen to take up the responsibility. So, she won’t complain.

She just has to carry on. Her life has permanently changed because of this; normal civilian life is unattainable for many, and even more so for her.

In the end, this was something a younger version of Fareeha had to accept, to concede to.

Even so, she can try to cobble together some sense of normalcy, can’t she?

She remembers, still, so vividly the last thing her mother had said to her in person, years ago: _“Fareeha, you won’t do this.”_ And, before that, many times: _“This isn’t a game. No one wins. Everyone loses.”_

Fareeha did, of course, go on to join the military.

She recognizes where her mother had been coming from. Deep inside her, however, sits a heavy bitterness over their arguments, one she can’t seem to release.

War is the farthest thing from a game, and she had long since stopped regarding it as such. She had learned better, through introspection and experience, and still chose to follow in her mother’s footsteps.

Her mother had never tried to understand, never stopped seeing Fareeha as her 13-year-old daughter, playing with a water gun, in too-loose overalls and bright pink shades.

Anyway, Fareeha believes that it is too defeatist to think the way Ana did.

She feels fulfilled, knowing she is working for and toward justice, making the world safer for the people she loves and cares for.

Also, she’s good at it—top marks at the academy, medals of recognition, promotion after promotion. It's deeply satisfying to do something you know you're good at it and indeed doing it well.

Certainly, Fareeha had struggled with identity in the past. It lent itself to her rather taciturn nature. People had seen her as unsociable, quiet as she was. She saw herself as someone on the margins of society. She was a lesbian, undeniably brown, and physically imposing with her height and musculature. But through her career, she had grown and gained confidence, had become comfortable in her own skin.

Fareeha had put in time, effort, and a fraction of her savings for therapy, to get to where she is now.

Though she may seem reserved, she is wholly affirmed in her identity and her principles.

She is fully confident in her choices; she was in the right when she left home and enlisted.

It isn’t a black-and-white matter of winning and losing like her mother had made it out to be. She agreed that no one came out a winner. But people could certainly win things and lose things. Fareeha thought that small victories are always better than none. If she could protect people from greater, unrecoverable loss, then she would.

Her mother wasn’t completely wrong, but she wasn’t completely right.

So, Fareeha cannot let go of all their fights.

For years, she had fought hard and flourished in her career, and received nothing but radio silence from her mother.

Sure, she coveted her independence, but she would always be her mother’s daughter, and would always care about what her mother thought of her.

It's hard, though. To care about her mother. She found the emotions her mother provoked awfully complicated and dissatisfying.

There was always an underlying love, earnest and unyielding. Raw. Tender. Aching, from the way she had left things off with her mother: straightening her shoulders, curtly, “ _Yes, I will_ ,” and closing the door behind her without so much as a backwards glance at the woman who birthed her, raised her, loved her.

And beneath this bed of earnest daughterly love, lay a monster that snapped and gnawed at Fareeha. 

How could this have happened? How could Ana have allowed it? How could _Fareeha_ have allowed it?

During the first few weeks after she left, lying in her cot for the 5 hours of sleep she was allowed in the academy, she would return to that last argument and doubt herself. Remorse and regret would settle in her chest and weigh down on her to the point that she would struggle to get back up.

But she managed, and with every drill Fareeha flew through, every exam she aced, every battle won, her resolve would harden into resentment.

So, when she wasn't tending to the bruising misery of their estrangement, she was reeling from a fit of profound, bone-deep anger. Learning to compartmentalize and deal with her emotions more healthily had been difficult for her, but she at least tried her best and saw some positive change. 

Another thing her mother would later ruin.

For so long, she had been mourning her relationship with her mother, when it came to _actually_ losing Ana, it was hard for Fareeha to puzzle out her emotions.

Some aspects felt the same: empty despair, stark loneliness, desperation for just _one_ more good day with her mother. But then there was the guilt, something she hadn’t felt with such force and volume since her early days in the military. It was crushing and she had, indeed, collapsed under it.

She could have tried harder. She could have listened. 

In her grief, she imagined a kinder, more lenient Ana. Imagined that if she had made some concessions, surely her mother would have done the same in return. Thought that her stubborn refusal to take the first step in reconciliation had led her to where she was.

Fareeha had lost her mother twice, by that point.

Then, the letter came, hand-delivered no less, as Fareeha figured by its lack of stamps. 

At her worst, Fareeha would shake with fury. She would think that she should have expected it, really.

Her mother never did know when to leave it alone when it mattered.

Afterwards, she would feel bad—not many people had parents, and so many would kill to have them back—and then she'd feel a righteous sort of angry that she had to feel bad in the first place.

You can't return something that was never really lost in the first place.

She doesn’t write back, in part out of pettiness. Her mother had never made an effort to hear her out, after all. Fareeha shouldn’t waste her words.

Lately, though, she has also felt that she doesn’t _need_ to write back.

Her mother was and is cunning, was and is what she is: Fareeha's mother. She knows Fareeha in a way few else do and is familiar with the way Fareeha approaches things.

She hadn’t been blind to the hurt she had caused Fareeha during their arguments. It's likely, even, that Ana knew how Fareeha felt after they had stopped speaking, knew the kinds of thoughts Fareeha must have had at the time, when Fareeha was shooting up the military ranks and sinking deeper into depression. Maybe, perhaps, Ana had felt similar emotions and thought similar things herself.

Still, years after their estrangement, there is no doubt in Fareeha's mind that, somehow, her mother is aware of how Fareeha feels about her, about the whole situation, more recently. She doesn't need to write a formal letter, airing out their laundry. They both already know.

Mostly, however, it’s just too hard for Fareeha. She can’t figure out if she wants to say anything at all. And if she did, doesn't know what to say, how to say it, where to even begin. Can’t put into words all the things she wants to tell her mother; already, it is tedious trying to sort it all out in her head.

The drafts she had written and tossed out always felt too little or too much, too light or too heavy.

So, Fareeha doesn’t write back. Silence. It’s what they’re best at, isn’t it?

Best to take a moment, shake these thoughts off, and carry on with her life. Take a deep breath. 

Fareeha slows to a stop and puts her shopping bags down on the sidewalk. She tilts her head back and squints, making out the hard outlines of her city against the dark blue of the sky. The buildings are low here. She's noticed this a lot.

She wonders, not for the first time, if Ana is watching her.

A part of her wants to shout out at the buildings, demand that her mother stop skulking about in the shadows, maybe throw a middle finger or two up to the skies. She tempers the urge down.

Her thoughts and feelings about her mother are a whirlwind, revolving around a space in the center. In the eye lies a persistent sense of inevitably. On good days, she names it hope. Other days, it remains an empty shape.

But she's an optimist at heart. One day, she knows she will see her mother again, and she will get closure.

A sudden gust of wind blows by, someone's laundry fluttering from a window, and the streetlights buzz above her. Nothing else stands out to her.

She sighs, looking back down to the road ahead of her, and picks up her groceries, and walks home.

**Author's Note:**

> pls lmk if u see any mistakes, like grammar shit or if i fucked up some lore stuff cos i only looked up the shit to do w/ ana and fareeha and like.. skimmed the mercy short lmao overwatch lore has me so confused i swear... idk how active this part of the fandom is but comments appreciated x
> 
> anyway amari family angst always has me so emo........ i need more fics where ana's being a bird mom w/ her bird daughter :(


End file.
